Chapter Thirty-Two – Gideon
An email Thursday morning puts me in a mood, and not a particularly good mood at that. I read it over once, then twice, three times before I push myself away from my computer and take a walk through the house to clear my head.
Bradford Bentley, following up yet again. Seeing me at the dinner party must’ve reignited his desire to buy me out of Chase Jewels.
Prior to now, I always had other things going on, such as taking care of Colter and making sure my nephew lived to see another day. I never let Bradford’s offers upset me. Today, however, is a different story. I can’t help but feel irritated at his persistence.
I head upstairs, hoping to find Raeka, but she isn’t in her room. I didn’t see her downstairs either, so it must mean she’s spending some time with Colter—and if that’s the case, I don’t want to interrupt. So, I head further down the hall and come across Pax’s room.
The alpha is in the middle of working out with dumbbells, wearing tight, black athletic clothes that show off his musculature. As an über, he’s built differently. Bigger. Thicker. Stronger all around. A king among alphas, truly.
He sits on his bed, doing curls of some sort, and though his back is to me, he must sense me, because he grunts, “Are you going to come in or stand there and watch?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt—” I don’t step inside his bedroom; it feels like a private space… or maybe that’s just my inner alpha bowing to his.
Pax pauses his workout, leaning to set the heavy dumbbell on the floor before he turns his head. His light blond hair is slick with sweat, but his green eyes are as alert as ever. “Just come in and tell me what’s wrong.”
I barely had to say anything for him to know something is off with me; yet another indication that we’re on the same wavelength.
Heaving a sigh, I step into his room and pace the length of it. “I got an email from Bradford Bentley.”
His brows furrow as he watches me pace his room. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
Oh, right. He wasn’t with Raeka and I at the dinner party, so he wasn’t introduced to him.
I explain, “He’s… a competitor, basically.
He runs Alpha Life, a company that’s recently overtaken Chase Jewels in sales and growth.
He’s wanted to buy me out of my share of the company for years now.
I thought he’d given up. Raeka and I were unfortunate enough to see him at the dinner party, and it seems to have rekindled his desire to get what he wants. ”
“So tell him you don’t want to sell.” The way Pax says it, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, makes me stop and stare at him. “Or,” he says once he notes my expression, “tell him you’ll sell?”
I set my hands on my hips and shake my head once.
Finally, he gets it. “You don’t know what you want to do.”
“Before, when it was just Colter and I… I never really paid much thought to his offers. They were always generous, yes, but the Chase name used to mean something. I always thought once I set Colter on the right path, things would go back to the way they used to be, but now I don’t know if that’s even possible. ”
Pax stands and stretches. He cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders. “If you don’t want to sell, then don’t. But if you do want to sell, I’m sure everyone will understand.”
“I… don’t know. For the first time, I feel like I’m actually entertaining the notion of selling. A part of me wonders if washing my hands of the company for good would make things easier.”
“How so?” He folds his arms over his chest and cocks his head at me.
I’ve always known I wasn’t quite a normal alpha.
Not as tall as some, not as thick as some.
My eyes aren’t that good—an affliction the majority of alphas don’t deal with.
Being in a room alone with an alpha like Pax should put me on edge, especially since he basically came into my territory and helped to throw my life into an upheaval.
But we’re past that point now, I think. When I look into the alpha’s emerald stare, I only see one thing: pack.
“It’s a reminder of where both Colter and I have been, where we came from. Selling it might help us move on… if moving on is a true option.”
Pax lets out a deep lungful of air. “Maybe you don’t need to move on.
Maybe you haven’t been doing well with your company because you’ve been trying to replicate shit you did in the past. You’ve been trying to hold on to the company’s past image.
I’m no businessman, but I do know everything changes with time. Just look at us.”
His arms fall to his sides, and he moves closer to me. “Maybe what you need to do is not move on, but move up. Change things. Go about things differently. Make Chase Jewels into something different, something better. There’s always room for improvement.”
The alpha now stands less than two feet away, his alpha musk thick in the air, and it occurs to me that he might be doing it unintentionally in an effort to calm me down. And, what would you know? I think it’s working.
“Wise advice,” I remark.
He cocks his head at me. “Surprised? Did you think I was just some meathead with no brain on my shoulders?”
“Not exactly…”
He frowns at me, although it’s a half-hearted scowl at best—a throwback to when he first arrived at this house, scowling at any and everything. “Are you trying to insult me, Gideon?” There’s an underlying whisper of a tease in his voice, but it’s hard to discern through the frown.
“Not at all, alpha.” I hold his intense stare for a few moments, and then I drop my eyes to his chest. “You’ve proven yourself to me in many ways.
When I first hired you, I had no idea that…
that things would change like this.” It goes hand in hand with what he said before: change can be a good thing. There’s always room to improve.
“You’re not the only one who’s surprised at how things turned out, but for what it’s worth, I think you were doing a great job here with your nephew before Raeka and I came along. Not everybody would’ve done what you did.”
The compliment from him fills me with a certain type of satisfaction I can’t say I’ve ever felt before. Even when I used to sit at the board meetings where we’d go over the profits of Chase Jewels for the past fiscal year, back when the profits used to build and compound on the previous year.
No, this is different. This type of satisfaction makes me warm inside—all over, really. It even brings a low ache to my balls and a tingle at the tip of my cock, and as a result it makes me think back to a question Raeka had asked me after the doctor’s appointment the other day.
Would I use her toy knot on myself? In the past, my answer would have been an easy no, but that reply did not come out that day, because now the answer isn’t so easy.
And, of course, making me think of using a toy knot on myself led me to think of other possible knots—one in particular—so let’s just say I was grateful that Raeka left it at that and she didn’t push me on it.
Standing there, before Pax, there’s only one answer to her question: yes. The answer is yes .
Pax’s eyes fall, and I pretend to be blissfully unaware that the ache and tingle in my lower half morphed into the beginning stages of a hardening cock.
“Seems to me,” he says, his voice a bit lower and rougher than it had been mere moments ago, “you enjoy being praised almost as much as our omega.”
While it’s true that no one has really given me any form of praise before—I only ever did what was expected of me, or so I thought—it can’t be generalized, and he needs to know that. So I say, “Only by our omega.” I swallow hard. “And you.”
He takes another step toward me, and now there’s less than a foot between us. “Then aren’t you lucky I’m here, alpha?”
I’m seconds from affirming his words when an overpoweringly sweet smell enters my nostrils, mingling and mixing with Pax’s musk to form something new. Fresh and fruity, raspberries with a hint of cream.
Raeka, since she no longer wears that scent-blocking cream when she’s here in the house.
Pax and I both smell it simultaneously, and we both turn our heads to the open doorway, where our omega stands, her nose lifted, as if she’s smelling us right back. Is her sense of smell beginning to return, or is it too much to hope that our scent together lured her right to us?
“I was headed to the kitchen to grab something to drink, but…” She trails off, as if she herself doesn’t quite understand. “Something made me come down here.” Her eyes fall to my groin, where she notices the hard-on I’m currently sporting.
I may be speechless, but the über alpha in the room isn’t. He asks, “Can you smell us?”
She brings a hand to her nose, lightly touching it, as a look of gentle horror crosses her beautiful face. “I don’t know.” Still, even now, she isn’t quite ready to admit the truth. On her own time, she will. I know she will.
As for me? She smells utterly delicious, and if my cock wasn’t already hardening up, it’d definitely be so now.
“You smell like sin on two legs,” Pax growls out, and I feel that growl reverberate in my chest and other parts of me. “Come in here. Take another detour from your route to the kitchen and join us.”
I only tear my gaze off our omega to look at Pax, though I only look at him for a few moments.
His tight workout clothes hide absolutely nothing, and I find I’m not the only one sporting a hard dick right now.
The outline of his large, thick monster is nothing but an omen for the size of what his knot must be.
Raeka, ever the spunky one, sets a single hand on her hip and says, “And why should I, Mr. Alpha?” The way she tosses it out, like she’s mocking Pax, makes him growl again, and I suck in a hard breath as a result—as does she.
“Come in here, take off your clothes, and prove to us both that you’re not wet just looking at us,” he orders her, though he does not use his dominance on her.